Happy Birthday

Two little girls, Nelly (Khadija Ahmed) and Toha (Doha Ramadan), play together before the rest of the household is awake, sticking sparkles and ornaments on last year’s party dress to make it look different for this year’s birthday. It’s a little world of imagination and shared fun and happiness until the older residents of the house begin to stir. As Nelly starts to get ready for school, Toha grabs a headscarf and begins to help Nelly’s mother Laila (Nelly Karim), make breakfast for her friend. We immediately understand what Toha’s real position is, something that the little girl will only become fully aware of through the course of the next day.

Toha and Nelly assume that Toha will be coming to Nelly’s ninth birthday party that evening – an event made even more special as Nelly has pledged to give her a birthday candle wish – but the adults in their lives have other ideas.

Egyptian-American director Sarah Goher (writing with Mohamed Diab) draws on her own childhood experiences, and keeps us wedded to Toha’s perspective throughout. The young girl’s open-hearted response to what life throws at her over the next 12 or so hours emphasises the unfairness of a system that casually relegates children like Toha to subservient roles. By keeping us on Toha’s level, including through child-height lensing from cinematographer Seif El Din Khaled, we become fully immersed in her angle on the world at the same time as being aware of how others view her.

This is particularly acute as she accompanies Laila, who has an ulterior motive for staging the party, on a shopping trip to a swanky mall. Toha’s unconcealed joy at being able to rake around a shop for party favours comes with the sting, for us, of seeing the way the shop owners view her. Later, after Toha is returned to her family’s home on a pretext, we see the stark difference between the gated community opulence of Nelly’s place and the place Toha’s widowed mother shares with the young girls’ siblings.

While bringing home the injustice of life for Toha, Goher treads a careful line so as not to turn the adults into cartoonish 'bad guys', which makes the situation all the more upsetting. It’s easy, for example, to see why her mother might view working as a maid as a better option than fishing in waters so risky that they claimed her husband’s life. Equally, while we may not condone Laila’s attitude towards the youngster, we are able to see how, from her perspective, she has justified it to herself.

Goher – whose debut feature has been selected as Egypt's Oscar entry this year – is also adept at imbuing small things with a lot of meaning. The birthday dress, for example, will become a disputed item more than once in a drama that constantly nudges us to think about ownership. Ramadan is the real find here, however, her sunny attitude gradually clouding as reality rolls like an unstoppable force of nature into – and over – her dreams.

Reviewed on: 07 Dec 2025